Anatomy of Criticism
10 best books like Anatomy of Criticism (Northrop Frye): The Rhetoric of Fiction, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, Critical Terms for Literary Study, The Philosophy of Literary Form, The Rise of the Novel, Updated Edition, Axel's Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust, Theory of Prose
| Author | Wayne C. Booth |
| ISBN | 0226065588 |
The first edition of The Rhetoric of Fiction transformed the criticism of fiction and soon became a classic in the field. One of the most widely used texts in fiction courses, it is a standard reference point in advanced discussions of how fictional form works, how authors make novels accessible, and...
| Author | Cleanth Brooks |
| ISBN | 0156957051 |
In my freshman year of college, I remembered reading Brooks' essay on Keats: A Sylvan Historian, I was completely engulfed with Mr. Brooks interpretation of the poem. It gave me a different perspective on how to further analyze Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn. Moreover, when I read the essay, I felt like I...
| Author | Frank Kermode |
| ISBN | 0195136128 |
s/t: With a New Epilogue
Frank Kermode is one of our most distinguished and beloved critics of English literature. Here, he contributes a new epilogue to his collection of classic lectures on the relationship of fiction to age-old concepts of apocalyptic chaos and crisis. Prompted by the approach...
| Author | M.H. Abrams |
| ISBN | 0195014715 |
It's the first time I've had this reaction when reading an 'academic' book: awe and envy. I usually have 2 stock reactions: 1. interesting, but the author's argument was screwed in A and B manner and 2. how did this guy even get his phd?! in a cereal box!?
M.H. Abrams is too good to be anywhere near...
| Author | Frank Lentricchia |
| ISBN | 0226472035 |
Since its publication in 1990, Critical Terms for Literary Study has become a landmark introduction to the work of literary theory—giving tens of thousands of students an unparalleled encounter with what it means to do theory and criticism. Significantly expanded, this new edition features six...
| Author | Kenneth Burke |
| ISBN | 0520024834 |
From the ForewordThese pieces are selections from work done in the Thirties, a decade so changeable that I at first thought of assembling them under the title, "While Everything Flows." Their primary interest is in speculation on the nature of linguistic, or symbolic, or literary action--and...
| Author | Ian P. Watt |
| ISBN | 0520230698 |
The Rise of the Novel is Ian Watt's classic description of the interworkings of social conditions, changing attitudes, and literary practices during the period when the novel emerged as the dominant literary form of the individualist era.
In a new foreword, W. B. Carnochan accounts for the...
| Author | Edmund Wilson |
| ISBN | 0374529272 |
Published in 1931, Axel's Castle was Edmund Wilson's first book of literary criticism--a landmark book that explores the evolution of the French Symbolist movement and considers its influence on six major twentieth-century writers: William Butler Yeats, Paul Valéry, T. S. Eliot, Marcel Proust,...
Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust
| Author | Paul De Man |
| ISBN | 0300028458 |
This important theoretical work by Paul de Man sets forth a mode of reading and interpretation based on exemplary texts by Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. The readings start from unresolved difficulties in the critical traditions engendered by these authors, and they return to the...
| Author | Victor Shklovsky |
| ISBN | 0916583643 |
Viktor Shklovsky's 1925 book Theory of Prose might have become the most important work of literary criticism in the twentieth century had not two obstacles barred its way: the crackdown by Soviet dictatorship on Shklovsky and other Russian Formalists in the 1930s, and the unavailability of an English...
Revised twice since it first appeared, it has remained one of the most widely read and quoted works of literary analysis. Ambiguity, according to Empson, includes "any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language." From this definition,...
A half-century after its translation into English, Erich Auerbach's "Mimesis" still stands as a monumental achievement in literary criticism. A brilliant display of erudition, wit, and wisdom, his exploration of how great European writers from Homer to Virginia Woolf depicted reality has taught...
| Author | Lionel Trilling |
| ISBN | 0151511977 |
The Liberal Imagination is one of the most admired and influential works of criticism of the last century, a work that is not only a masterpiece of literary criticism but an important statement about politics and society. Published in 1950, one of the chillier moments of the Cold War, Trilling's essays...
| Author | Ivor A. Richards |
| ISBN | 0415254027 |
To us, Richards was infinitely more than a brilliantly new literary critic: he was our guide, our evangelist who revealed to us, in a succession of astounding lightning flashes, the entire expanse of the Modern World: Christopher Isherwood Ivor Armstrong Richards was one of the founders of modern...
| Author | Leslie A. Fiedler |
| ISBN | 1564781631 |
A retrospective article on Leslie Fiedler in the New York Times Book Review in 1965 referred to Love and Death in the American Novel as “one of the great, essential books on the American imagination . . . an accepted major work.” This groundbreaking work views in depth both American literature and...
| Author | René Wellek |
| ISBN | 0156890844 |
«باید یقین داشته باشیم که لذت ادبیات لذتی نیست که از میان لذتهای ممکن دیگر برگزیده شده باشد، بلکه لذتی است «والاتر». زیرا محصول کوشش والاتری است که همان...
Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities
| Author | Stanley Fish |
| ISBN | 0674467264 |
Stanley Fish is one of America's most stimulating literary theorists. In this book, he undertakes a profound reexamination of some of criticism's most basic assumptions. He penetrates to the core of the modern debate about interpretation, explodes numerous misleading formulations, and offers...
| Author | Tzvetan Todorov |
| ISBN | 0801491460 |
In The Fantastic, Tzvetan Todorov seeks to examine both generic theory and a particular genre, moving back and forth between a poetics of the fantastic itself and a metapoetics or theory of theorizing, even as he suggest that one must, as a critic, move back and forth between theory and history, between...
| Author | Harold Bloom |
| ISBN | 0195112210 |
Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence has cast its long shadow of influence since it was first published in 1973. Through an insightful study of Romantic poets, Bloom puts forth his central vision of the relations between precursors and the individual artist. His argument that all literary texts...
| Author | György Lukács |
| ISBN | 0262620278 |
Georg Lukacs wrote The Theory of the Novel in 1914-1915, a period that also saw the conception of Rosa Luxemburg's Spartacus Letters, Lenin's Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Spengler's Decline of the West, and Ernst Bloch's Spirit of Utopia. Like many of Lukacs's early essays, it is...
These essays reveal Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975)--known in the West largely through his studies of Rabelais and Dostoevsky--as a philosopher of language, a cultural historian, and a major theoretician of the novel. The Dialogic Imagination presents, in superb English translation, four selections...
| Author | Jonathan Culler |
| ISBN | 0801492017 |
From reviews of the first edition-- "Academic literary crticism continues to be dominated by 'theory' and the struggle between deconstructionist and humanist approaches to the business of reading. Jonathan Culler's On Deconstruction is a typically patient, thoughtful, illuminating exposition...
Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms
| Author | Franco Moretti |
| ISBN | 1844670562 |
A compelling analysis of the relations between high and mass culture, from tragedy and horror to detective fiction and classical realism.
Shakespearean tragedy and Dracula, Sherlock Holmes and Ulysses, Frankenstein and The Waste Land — all are celebrated “wonders” of modern literature,...
| Author | Roland Barthes |
| ISBN | 0374521670 |
I must be honest this was a re-read for me. Barthes's works were pre-eminent when I was navigating my way through university. So encouraged were we to embrace this 'enfant terrible' that I very nearly wrote my PhD on his ideas (in the end it had to be Poe!). Looking back now though there is no doubt that 'The...
